Neither has the $5,129 tax refund she is owed. The IRS has notified her that her 2019 tax returns are under review.

Dyer, a single mother and a social worker, suspects the two missing checks are connected. Hundreds of members of a Facebook group she created for people who haven’t gotten their stimulus check soon realized they had something else in common. They, too, have tax returns that are under audit or review.

“That’s what made us realize this is why we haven’t gotten our stimulus check yet,” said Dyer of Spring Hill, Tenn.

More than 130 million people have received stimulus checks totaling more than $200 billion since the government started distributing the payments under the CARES Act, a new federal law designed to reinvigorate the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic, the IRS said last week. More than 150 million payments will eventually be sent out, the agency said.

People who are eligible for a stimulus check are supposed to receive the money even if they owe back taxes. The IRS says on its website that stimulus payments won’t be reduced or offset because the recipient owes federal or state debts, except in cases involving past-due child support. The website doesn’t say, however, whether stimulus checks will be delayed until issues with a recipient’s taxes have been resolved.

The Treasury Department, which is overseeing the distribution of the checks, did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether the IRS is delaying some checks because of unresolved issues with a recipient’s past tax returns.

While there have been numerous reports of glitches preventing some recipients from receiving a stimulus check, tax experts said they have not heard of checks being delayed because of an issue with a recipient’s past tax returns.

It’s possible the stimulus payments could be held up because the IRS discovered an anomaly, such as a Social Security number that didn’t match its records or discrepancies in a child-tax credit claim, when it was processing an individual’s tax returns, said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Tax Policy Center.

All tax returns pass through a series of filters that check for identify theft, refund fraud or other issues, such as questionable claims of earned income tax credit or inflated withholdings, said Nina Olson, executive director and founder of the Center for Taxpayer Rights and a former taxpayer advocate at the IRS.

“At any point along the way, the return could be stopped by one of those filters,” Olson said.

But the anti-fraud filters have been highly inaccurate. Nearly three-quarters of the returns the filters stopped last year turned out to be legitimate, Olson said.

Ordinarily, someone whose tax returns have been flagged by one of the filters could turn to a taxpayer advocate for help. But the IRS’s taxpayer assistance centers are temporarily closed and other services are limited because of the coronavirus crisis, making it difficult for taxpayers to get answers about their missing tax returns and delayed stimulus checks.

“It’s aggravating,” said Aspen Gerald of Fayetteville, N.C., a mother of two who is waiting on $8,700 the government owes her through her tax refund and stimulus payment.

Gerald said she got a letter from the IRS in February saying the tax return she had filed a month earlier was under review. She filed an amendment in March to correct an error, but two weeks later she got a notice that her return was being audited. Since then, she said she has heard nothing about her refund or her stimulus check.

“Everything is on hold,” she said. “I can’t do anything.”

Anthony Mailloux of Dallas is owed $10,177 in a tax refund and stimulus. He sent paperwork to the IRS in February to resolve some issues on the tax return he filed a month earlier. The IRS already had his direct deposit information from where he had previously filed his taxes, so he assumed his stimulus check would show up when the government started sending them out in April.

It didn’t. Neither has his tax return. He went to the IRS website and re-entered his information. Still, no tax refund or stimulus.

Mailloux, a student with two children, has started an online petition that he intends to send to the IRS to bring attention to the problem. Mailloux said he and his wife are struggling to make ends meet while he waits for the government to send his money.

“Week by week, we’re watching ourselves go into the negative a little deeper and deeper,” he said.

Dyer said many of the 1,800 people in the Facebook group she created also are struggling as they wait for the government to send their checks. One woman is expecting a child at the end of May. Another who works as a contractor has eight children and has been out of work since March. Yet another wrote that she has just 73 cents to her name and doesn’t know how she’s going to survive.

“They have probably burned through their savings like I have, and we don’t know when we’re going to see unemployment, the tax refund or the stimulus check,” she said.

Dyer managed to pay her rent for April and May. But “moving forward, I’m not sure where that money is going to come from,” she said. “It’s either I pay my rent or I pay all of my utilities. I don’t know how I’m going to do that yet.”

Stephanie Dann, a mother of three from Millsboro, Delaware, said she has contacted the IRS multiple times about the $6,000 tax refund and $3,900 stimulus check she and her husband are owed. One agent said the missing stimulus check had nothing to do with her husband’s tax issues. Another suggested the opposite and said a hold on their taxes could in fact be delaying their stimulus.

“We don’t even know what the actual truth is because we’ve been getting different information from different agents,” she said. “It’s ridiculous. They need to figure out what’s going on.”